"The Feathery Rilke Mustaches and Porky Pig Tattoo on Stomach": High and Low Pressures in Gravity's Rainbow

Heikki Raudaskoski, University of Oulu, Finland

It is mid-July 1945, and at the same time it is some time after March, l973. The readers
of Gravity's Rainbow (those still aboard) have just passed halfway. A bunch of Argentine anarchists -- having hijacked a German U-boat in Mar del Plata, Argentina,
and trying to make it to Luneburg Heath near Hamburg, in order to make there a film
version of Jose Hernandézs epic poem, Martin Fierro, their anarchist
gaucho saint -- have been forced to launch a torpedo (Der Aal, the eel in German
submariner slang) against the U.S. war vessel John E. Badass. The narrator
continues: "Der Aal's pale tunnel of wake is set to intersect the Badass's
desperate seasquirm about midships " (389)

But something surfaces, a new drug to tell the truth, one called Oneirine. Seaman
"Pig" Bodine, this profane picaro, who stubbornly keeps popping up in many of
Pynchon's texts, has apparently spiced the war vessel's coffee grounds with a massive
dose of this celebrated new intoxicant. What are we to think of the Bakhtinian
chronotopes, the space-time combinations peculiar to narratives[1], where we are told:

The property of time-modulation peculiar to Oneirine was one of the first to be
discovered by investigators. 'It is experienced' writes Shetzline in his classic study, 'in a
subjective sense .. . uh ... well. Put it this way. It's like stuffing wedges of silver sponge
right, into, your brain! So, out in the mellow sea-return tonight the two
fatal courses do intersect in space, but not in time. Not nearly in time, heh
heh[2]. (389)

Here we have Bakhtin describing one of his main concepts: "The chronotope is the place
where knots of narrative are tied and untied."[3] In this case, however, readers deal with a
20th century chronotope. This chronotope illustates Heisenberg's undecidability
principle in a self-inflicted, hallucinogenic way typical of the 1960s. As is widely
known, Werner Heisenberg postulated in 1927 that it is impossible to determine both the
position and the velocity of a nuclear particle at the same time: the more accuracy is
used in specifying one, the more indeterminacy results in stating the other quantity.[4]
The knots of narrative are never completely tied or untied, readers never know exactly
where and when the crucial events take place in the narration. Or?

*

Sticking to knotting: on its first page Gravity's Rainbow makes a possible
commentary on itself, as many have noticed: "[T]his is not a disentanglement from, but a
progressive knotting into [...]." (3) Will all the threads of the text, its myriad storylines,
then, get into an unsolvable tangle? Or will they instead finally integrate into one final
plot, which would lead to the final chronotype, to the literally and/or metaphorically
final time and place? As so often in Pynchon's big novel, these very questions seem to
be overtly thematized at the end of the same Oneirine episode:

Now what sea is this you have crossed, exactly, and what sea it is you have
plunged more than once to the bottom of, alerted, full of adrenalin, but caught
really, buffaloed under the epistemologies of these threats that paranoid you
so down and out, caught in this steel pot, softening to devitaminized mush inside
the soup-stock of your own words, your waste submarine breath? It took
the Dreyfus Affair to get the Zionists out and doing, finally: what will drive out of
your soup-kettle" Has it already happened? Was it tonight's attack and
deliverance? Will you go to the Heath, and begin your settlement, and wait
there for your Director to come? (389-390)

"Will you go to the Heath?" -- a crucial question that points in many directions, not
all of which could possibly be named. As first time readers in the middle of Gravity's
Rainbowmight not know, the Luneberg Heath, Luneburger Heide, is most possibly a
place of central importance in the novel. It is just there that the Faustian Nazi-figure
Captain Blicero apparently launches his special 00000 rocket, sending his sado-
masochistic object, the pale Gottfried, to die in space. What is more, at the very end, the
same rocket (or is this a knot again?) seems to have transformed into a missile that is
nearing the roof of the Orpheus Theatre in L.A., where "we", a diegetic "audience" of the
novel, have been watching a movie, perhaps carrying the name Gravity's
Rainbow. On the other hand, in the novel's first episode a V-2 rocket has been
launched from the Continent toward London, while "Pirate" Prentice is dreaming how a
"screaming [does it roar only inside his head, I wouldn't be so sure] comes across the
sky." (3)

As the critics haven't failed to notice, the rocket's parabolic arc presents itself as the
whole novel's dominant structural metaphor. In connection with Gravity's
Rainbow it is probably most adequate to talk about the Rocket as Their plot -- a
"plot" with all its connotations -- that is threatening the paranoid characters in the novel.
Many of the deterministic and pessimistic readers of the 1970s especially, saw it literally
as the novel's totalizing deep structure[5]. The protagonist Tyrone Slothrop's journey
makes a shadow image of the parabola of V-2 rockets: from London via Southern
France to Northern Germany. Thus there might well be a closing correspondence
between parabola and parable. To speak in terms of the Russian Formalists: the
syuzhet of the text would be completely at the service of its underlying
fabula, the discourse at the service of the plot. Pynchon's masterpiece would
indeed be a vast apocalyptic jeremiad[6] about the fall of Western civilization. It would
show itself to be, in Bakhtin's sense[7], the representative, fatalistic epos of our times, the
Book to end them all. That's how many reacted to it when it came out. "Madness spews
forth in torrents, Pandora's evils incarnate!" wrote Publisher's Weekly[8].

"Will you go to the Heath?" might be a question pointed also at the book itself,
which might turn out to be, not a "novel" at all, but a monological epic. The
transcendental connection between signs and referents would, indeed, be established at
the end of Gravity's Rainbow. This would be the end, the ceasing to be, of
both the book and its readers, well, those of "us" in the Orpheus Theatre, at least. It
would be the ultimate chronotope, where time and place vanish. Those of "you" that the
narrator has been addressing, would melt together with Them, the carriers of the hostile
plot.

Just before the end the narrator notifies: "There is still time, if you need the comfort,
to touch the person next to you, or to reach between your own cold legs..." (760) Some
time remains, as if as an open question -- in the present tense, in the tense future. Even
the diegetic "us" will not, inside the novel, reach the terminal closure. And as long as
there is still an even minute barrier between "you" and the final end: as long as one
cannot reach the final presence which in this context would mean total absence,
possibilities for novelness, something new, remain.

**

As Michael Holquist puts it, chronotope is not, after all, a purely formal category, but
"the total matrix that is comprised by both the story and the plot of any particular
narrative."[9] Keeping this in mind, what can we say about this kind of
chronotopicality in Gravity's Rainbow? Does this mean that if there is no deep
structure, no unifying closure, in the novel, it must hopelessly become a vast array of
scattered storylines, a legion of separate "soup-kettle" submarines and solipsistic
consciousnesses drifting in the labyrinthine ocean of entropy? Is the paragraph I
quoted at length really a metaphor of a world, where isolated, low-feeling units stray like
never-arriving messages in the bottle, never-arriving since there's nobody "out there" to
receive the message? As one of the characters, Enzian, finds himself pondering:

Separations are proceeding. Each alternative Zone speeds away from all the
others, in fated acceleration, red-shifting, fleeing the Center. Each day the
mythical return Enzian dreamed of seems less possible. [...] Each bird has his
[sic] branch now, and each one is the Zone. (519)

Is this the way it has to be? I will postpone my answer. Instead I will ask again:

"Will you go the the Heath?" The question remains unanswered in the end;
something remains to be on the way. As long as there are some of "us", there is a
moment left, even if it were only as thick as the "the gnat's ass or red cunt hair"(664), as
one of the jack-of-all-trades narrator's similes goes. Still, the question remains important.
The least meaningful part in the question is not the second person pronoun it contains.
Brian McHale has shown the crucial importance that this little mercurial three-letter-
word has in the novel in transgressing narrative categories[10]. "You" is doomed to endless
oscillation between tinier and larger audiences, and it is hard to imagine that the
movement could be anywhere carried out more intensely than in Gravity's
Rainbow.

At the moment I will ask: who are these "you" anyway, to whom the narrator refers
on this occasion? What are the chronotopes of these people and/or things called "you"?
What kind of a dialogue is this that surpasses the limits of a "normal" closed
conversation and, by containing disquieting surpluses, often confuses subject-object
positions? I have already regarded this as a metafictional device; I had the feeling I
caught the text talking to itself. Under the umbrella of "you", the text is forcing itself
also on some of its diegetic and extradiegetic narratees, each passively waiting inside
her/his own "steel pot" and "devitaminized", mushy "soup-stock" of his/her own words
(or the words s/he gets from the novel). These narratees, some of "us", (or some parts of
us), find themselves in a topsy-turvy situation, where it is rather the text that is reading
them than vice versa. You don't necessarily need drugs to get into Gravity's
Rainbow's hallucinogenic dialogics.

Perhaps it is, after all, most secure to come to the conlusion that, in the first place
(let's pretend that there still is a "first place" somewhere), the question: "Will you go to
the Heath" is aimed at these Argentine anarchists in their submarine. This, of course, may
also go for the other obsessive paranoids in the Zone, who try, inside the text, to make it
to the Luneburg Heath, or keep on the move, at least. Here you are: the American
Tyrone Slothrop, who wants to know why there certainly seems to be an intense
connection between his penis and V-2 missiles; Enzian with the other
Schwarzkommando, the representatives of the nearly destroyed Southwest-African
Herero tribe, who are probably looking for the Luneberg V-2 launching site to launch
their (holy?) counterpart 00001 to Captain Blicero's Rocket of Death; the Soviet spy
Tchitcherine trailing his black halfbrother Enzian, in order to revenge himself on the
injustices he has had to live through during Stalin's reign; the Pavlovian psychologists
whose mentor Laszlo Jamf has presumably conditioned Infant Tyrone's penis to have a
hardon in the presence of some enigmatic stimulus that might be connected to the
mysterious compound Imipolex G, which is presumably used in Captain Blicero's rocket;
the double agents Katje Borgesius and Captain "Pirate" Prentice, who may embody the
narrator's hypothesis that, had History taken another turn, there might "have been fewer
crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot? (556); and
witches, movie stars and directors, scholar-magicians, freaks, black market dealers,
sensitives, rocket scientists, lemmings, outcasts, whole central European peoples; all in
all, almost everyone among the Zone's ordinary paranoid hepcats.

Almost undoubtedly the narrator is addressing the focalizer of this episode, the
Argentine Graciela Imago Portales, who is in charge of the submarine's periscope. Or are
we eavesdropping her speaking to herself? Before the war Graciela had been the
harmless "urban idiot" of Buenos Aires, friends with everybody across the spectrum,
from anarchists to Catholics, but particularly within literary circles. The war may have, in
a way, driven her "out of the soup-kettle", "out and doing". Before the war, Borges is
said to have dedicated a poem to Graciela: "El laberinto de tu incertidumbre/ Me trama
con la disquietante luna..." (381) ("The labyrinth of your uncertainty/ Detains me with
the disquieting moon"[11]) Especially when translated into English, these lines can also be
seen to refer to these more general "you" I have been talking about: the labyrinthine
uncertainty of "you" causes anxiety. The uneasiness is accentuated by the fact that it is
the traditional relation between a gazing male subject and gazed female, "lunatic" object
that has started to hover here. Who are you, Graciela Imago Portales, your middle and
last names equaling "window image" in English? Is it so that you really don't know who
you are, or what is is that you are doing -- no longer a clear object, not yet a subject -- so
you have to keep asking? You do now the watching, deep down there, instead of being
the watched one. Will you be up with your male fellow travelers, and will you
all get "out and doing", perhaps outdoing Them? Or will you finally output as one of
Them, after the Director you have been waiting for has come?

Anxiety prevails. "You" begin to break out of your more specific contexts, even
when coming back in tense oscillations to those you have touched -- even if you were talking to yourself. "You" start moving your reckless potentials[12], much like the "diquieting moon" -- itself a metaphor par excellence of alterities -- in the quoted, apparently pseudo-Borgesian lines[13].
This is, however, not the first time in Gravity's Rainbow that Borges is
mentioned. Tyrone Slothrop comes across Francisco Squalidozzi, the anarchists' contact
person, when Slothrop is living through his phase as Ian Scuffling, a British journalist in
Zurich. Squalidozzi tells him:

"It is our national tragedy. We are obessesed with labyrinths, where before there
was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank
sheet. We cannot abide that openness: it is terror to us. Look at Borges [...]
Beneath the city street, the warrens of rooms and corridors, the fences and
networks of steel track, the Argentine heart, in its perversity and guilt, longs for a
return to that first unscribbled serenity ... that anarchic oneness of pampas and
sky..." (264)

It surely seems that there are some kinds of binary oppositions in the making: on
one hand there is a cluster of concepts like openness-anarchy-activity-fearlessness-
energy-oneness and on the other their opposites closedness-hierarchy-passivity-
fearfulness-exhaustedness-fragmentation. It is precisely the open anarchic possibilities
of the German Zone just at the moment of the war's end that attract these Argentine
radicals:

In ordinary times" he [Squalidozzi] wants to explain, "the center always wins.
Its power grows with time, and that can't be reversed, not by ordinary means.
Decentralizing, back toward anarchism, needs extraordinary times ... this War, this
incredible War -- just for the moment has wiped out the proliferation of little states
that's prevailed in Germany for ahtousand years. Wiped it clean. Opened it. [...]
It won't last, of course not. But for a few months...[...] We want it to grow,
to change. In the openness of the Zone, our hope is limitless." Then, as if struck
on the forehead, a sudden fast glance, not at the door, but up at the ceiling --
"So is our danger." (264-265)

< p>Hope and danger, both limitless in the Zone. No wonder the readers find the
narrator (perhaps ventriloquizing Graciela Imago Portales) contemplating some one
hundred pages later: is there possibly anything at all that "will drive you out of your
soup-kettle", all of you, above all these South American characters, particularly Graciela
Imago Portales herself, "buffaloed under the epistemologies that paranoid you so down
and out, caught in this steel pot"? (389-390) Or do we have a story like, say Dreiser's
An American Dream or Dos Passos's U.S.A., where the prevailing mood consists of
determinism, pessimism, and disablement?

***

At this point, it is high time to notice that the inhabitants of the novel do have a high
time, in the midst of the narration, time and again. This doesn't refer solely to drugs. This
high time is characteristically low time, too. I'm referring to those not infrequent passages
in Pynchon's texts that have caused trouble to Frank Kermode, among others: "[T]hose
terrible pop-song lyrics Pynchon has always enjoyed inserting in his narratives [...] are
terrible."[14] Precisely: one can't avoid the feeling that it is the musical in its varous forms
that could be the most intensive narrativew metaphor for Gravity's Rainbow,
"Pynchon's Great Song" as Thomas Schaub[15] has named it. At times one is struck by the
notion that it is just these Dionysiac thickenings here and there in the text that act as
counterbalances to those passages, where the narrator laments over loss, exhaustion,
fragmentation, and suffering in the world. These bursts of energy tend to take the
characters by surprise, too. This is what happens to "Pirate" Prentice, when he has got
into some kind of a carnivalistic Hell for double agents:

Ah, they do bother him , these free women in their teens, their spirits are so
contagious,

Nobody's in their cages, because the spirit is just so contagious. Might there really
be a possibility to get out and doing, to be moved by the spontaneous Spirit? In his
essay, "Entertainment and Utopia", Richard Dyer writes about the utopian sensibility of
the musical. He lists the main characteristics of the musical as follows: energy,
abundance, intensity, transparency, and community. By energy Dyer means 'capacity to
act vigorously, realized human potentiality'; by abundance 'conquest of scarcity and
enjoyment of sensuous material reality'; by transparency a quality fo relationships (e.g.
true love and/or sincerity); and community means 'togetherness, sense of belonging'. [16] All these characteristics are to be found, or so it strongly feels, in the verbal performance
above -- as if the possible sly-ironic overtones would be overwhelmed by these all-
embracing, excessive characteristics.

In Dyer's view these features of entertainment explain why entertainment works: "It
is not just left-overs from history, it is not just what show business, or "they" [sic], force
on the rest of us, it is not simply the expression of eternal needs -- it responds to real
needs created by society.[17]" Here we have those binary oppositions again:
energy/exhaustion, abundance/scarcity, intensity/dreariness, transparency/manipulation,
and community/fragmentation. One can't help noticing that the first parts of these pairs
characterize, at least ostensibly, lots of passages in Gravity's Rainbow. (And so do
their opposites, to be sure.) Each and every passage like this is invariably contaminated
by some form of "popular" or "mass" culture. What are the numerous chase scenes in the
novel, if not tireless indicators of energy? This is all the more true when some episodes
become hybrids of various popular genres.

Think about Slothrop's adventure in the balloon, with the vengeful Major Marvy in
his airplane chasing him and singing ominous "Rocket Limericks" with his staff (e.g.
"There once was a fellow named Ritter/ who slept with a guidance transmitter/ It
shriveled his cock/ which fell off in his sock/ and made him exceedingly bitter". (334)).
What else could be the only effecient weapon, or preferably the only available
energetic popular genre, but throwing pies right at the antagonist's face and the engine
of his plane? (335-336) Bakhtin knew it already: the great heroes of literature and
language "turn out to be first and foremost gnres"[18] . One experiences the mixing of the
genres of aviation movies and comics, chase adventures, obscene army humour,
limericks, and silent farces, to name a few.

There are also moments of unexpected abundance. In the behaviorist Pointsman's
laboratory the rats and other test animals suddenly seem to grow human-size (as big as
the somewhat stunned "focalizer" Webley Silvernail himself) and begin their beguine:

PAVLOVIA (BEGUINE)
It was spring in Pavlovia-a-a,
I was lost, in a maze...
Lysol breezes perfumed the air,
I'd been searching for days
I found you, in a cul-de-sac,
As bewildered as I--
We touched noses, and suddenly
My heart learned how to fly!
So, together, we found our way,
Shared a pellet, or two ...
Like an evening in some cafe,
Wanting nothing, but you ...
Autumn's come, to Pavlovia-a-a,
Once again, I'm alone --
Finding sorrow by millivolts,
Back to neurons and bone.
And I think of our moments then,
Never knowing your name --
Nothing's left in Pavlovia,
But the maze, and the game ...
They dance in flowing skeins. The rats and mice form circles, curl their tails in and
out to make chrysanthemum and sunburst patterns, eventually all form into
the shape of a single giant mouse [...]. (229-230)

The passage expresses some kind of tension between scarcity and abundance, to say
the least. Even the gnawers may bear withing themselves potentials to get out of their
"soup-kettles" and change into sparkling dancers in a 1930s music spectacle. "Nobody's
in their cages, the spirit is just so contagious", as the readers were told in the previous
song.

This is, however, a more explicit parody of the musical genre as well; the contrast
between "the real social tensions" and their "utopian solution" in entertainment is
exposed and estranged too plainly. Subaltern groups, like women (as in the first song),
gay men, and black people have played a central role in the history of the musical, but
laboratory rats express their oppressed status, even in the representation of an excessive
genre like this, a bit too clearly. The song becomes ambiguous; there is an
undoubted feeling of -- at least momentary -- abundance and energy, but one cannot say
the same about intensity, transparency, or community. Direct emotional experiencing,
transparent relations between characters, or the sense of togetherness are all surely
implied in this verbal performance. Still, the impression is mixed --"bewildered" as the
animal protagoniast themselves -- when compared with the purity of entertainment.
"Spirit's just so contagious"; 'contagious' carries here many meanings: it is 'catchy' and
'contaminating' at the same time.

"Nothing's left in Pavlovia, but the maze, and the game". Perhaps this is not
completely true: something might well be left to remind the inhabitants and readers of
Gravity's Rainbow of the utopian potentials of popular culture. This vulgar
sensibility is one of the things that distinguishes Pynchon from one of his mentors[19]
and another labyrinth builder, the intelligent Borges. It is much easier to find remnants
of that sensibility in Kafka, a mentor of Borges. Borges himself was conscious of
retrospective lines like this, when he wrote about Kafka and his precursors: Zeno, Han
Yu, Kierkegaard, Robert Browning, etc. If you ask me, the most memorable lines in this
essay of Borges run as follows: "The fact is that every writer creates his [sic]
own precursors. His [sic] work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the
future."[20]

***

It is obvious that Pynchon's labyrinthine carnivalism (there we have it) brings
together at least two generic traditions. And since, as Bakhtin insists, "it is precisely the
chronotope that defines genre and generic traditions"[21] , it may be concluded that the
novel brings together two kinds of chronotopicalities as well. The first is that of maze
spinners: in this repect the whole of Gravity's Rainbow is a huge bundle of
overlaping labyrinths with centers missing: everyone is "always already" in quest in the
middle of something without a clear point of origin or a tangible telos. The situation is
emphasized, when, on his Tannhauserian trip to the German rocket factory inside a
mountain (its name is tellingly Mittelwerke, Middle Factory), Slothrop
paradoxically feels the presence of an absent center[22]:

[A]mazing perfect whiteness. Whiteness without heat, and blind inertia:
Slothrop feels a terrible familiarity here, a center he has been skirting,
avoiding as long as he can remember -- never has he been as close as now to the
true momentum of his time: faces and facts that have crowded his indenture to the
Rocket, camouflage and distraction fall away for the white moment, the vain and
blind tugging at his sleeves it's important ... please ... look at us ... but it's
already too late, [...] and the blood of his eyes has begun to touch the whiteness
back to ivory, to brushings of gold and a network of edges to the broken rock ...
(312)

Does it have to follow, when the centers are not to be found, that the only
possibility left is "softening to the devitaminized mush inside the soup-stock of your
own words", as we have heard it surmised?

****

Possibly this is not the case. Outbursts of "utopian sensibility" (to cite Dyer's words)
are capable of breaking loose every now and then. It is, after all, no wonder that many
critics in the 1970s were blind to anything meaningful in Gravity's Rainbow's
energetic and plebeian "breeding ground". Bakhtin's breakthrough has helped us to
see the novel's popular cultural aspects as belonging to the very core of carnivalistic
"novelness". This holds true especially for Pynchon's "poetry": the incorporation of
lyrical pieces is an age-old feature of Menippean, hybrid novelness. In addition to these
pieces the novel turns out to be an encyclopedia of popular culture and subcultural
discourses[23] (gaining both forms of representation and material from them): jokes,
genres of billingsgate, detective and spy ficction, comic books and strips, science fiction, horror stories, fantasy, pulp magazines, pornographic literature, various forms of cinema, black English, Hispanic slang, street speech, underworld cant, regional dialect, military slang,
parapsychology, children's lore, etc.

There are no reasons, however, to identify Pynchon's carnivalistic motifs with
Bakhtin's reading of Rabelais and thus essentialize carnival. To begin with, both the
Catholic Church and high sophisticated tradition in literature were distinct dominating
centers, which carnival and the carnivalesque literature could antagonize with ridicule.
Besides, it seems clear that Bakhtin's carnivalistic interpretation bears heavy marks of
organiscistic, transindividualistic communalism based on agriculture. Bakhtin's carnival
does have an angle to it: it is that of the folk, of down-to-earth people. It is from
that unifying ethical position that noble truths are put into degrading motion, where
oppositions ceaselessly melt into jolly hybrids.[24] Carnival is an open chronotope like the Argentine pampas, but it has got fences around it, relative to both time and
place. No wonder many have considered it as a form of reproduction, of controlled
rebellion, which ultimately helped the medieval and early modern centers to consolidate
their positions.[25]

Inside Pynchon's carnival one can never be sure what the powers above are like.
There is, of course, a strong feeling of oppressive structures beyond the visible. A
legion of centripetal, monlogical, deterministic "grand narratives"[26] present themselves
in Gravity's Rainbow. Among them are the Pavlovian psychology, pre-Einsteinian sciences (especially chemistry), technocracy, ballistics, Puritan religion, patriarchalism, multinational capitalism, Nazism, Bolshevism, growing bureaucracy outlined by Weber,
some uses of Rilke's poetry, etc. The big question is: do these monological threads ultimately entrangle into a total grand narrative, which might be most intensely
symbolized by the parabolic arc of rocketry, by "gravity's rainbow".
Yet the Rocket, connecting paranoid activities, may not at all be What Is Really
Cooking. Enzian feels this:

[...] yes and now what if we -- all right, say we are supposed to be the
Kabbalists out here, say that's our real destiny, to be the scholar-magicians of the
Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces annotated, explicated,
and masturbated till it's all squeezed limp of its last drop ... well we assumed --
naturlich! -- that this holy Text had to be the Rocket, orururumo orunene the
high, rising, dead, the blazing, the great one ("orunene" is already being
modified by the Zone-Herero children to "omunene", the eldest brother) ... our
Torah. What else? Its symmetries, its latencies, the cuteness of it enchanted
and seduced us while the real Text persisted, somewhere else, in its darkness,
our darkness ... (520)

Instead of being enchanted by the totemic Rocket, Enzian insists that the preterite
people of the Zone should "look for power sources here, and distribution networks we
were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to
avoid ... we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own
schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the
real function ... zeroing in on what incalculable plot?" (521)

This sounds much like the "cognitive mapping" that Fredric Jameson has been
promoting during the last decade[27]. Yet unlike Jameson, nobody in the Zone, not even
Enzian no matter how much he tries, let alone any of the readers to my knowledge, is
able to find out how all aspects (in what might be the most heteroglottic text of all
times) could really be united into some "incalculable plot", some totalizable dialectic, Hegelian phase in History. Things get all too kinky for the critters of the Zone to make up anything like that: "Those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity." (582) The paranoid feeling of
an all-encompassing secret network no doubt resembles what Jameson (modifying
Lyotard) calls "the postmodern sublime"[28]. Still in regard to Gravity's Rainbow
one is deemed to be Preterite, fallen from grace, grace that can also mean the Marxist
self-confidence about the course of history. Grace belongs to Them, the Elect, in every
version of Their Western Puritan Grand Narratives.

******

Bakhtin writes: "Dialogue and dialectics. Take dialogue and remove the voices (the
particular voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve
out abstract concepts and judgements from living words and responses, cram everything
into one abstract consciousness -- and that's how you get into dialectics."[29] Perhaps it is
not needless to add that this "one abstract consciousness" refers to the white, masculine,
western selfsameness -- and the logic of Hegelian "Aufhebungs" can only produce junior
variations on the theme of that selfsameness. If History is one big story about the
emancipation of humankind, people should be ready to die for this better future. However, Tchitcherine the Russian is asked: "Marxist dialectics. That's not an opiate, eh? [...]
Die to help History grow to its predestined shape. Die knowing your act will bring a
good end a bit closer. Revolutionary suicide, fine. But look: if History's changes are inevitable, why not not die?" (701) Bearing Bakhtin's heavy words about dialectics
in mind, it may be good to remember that they apply also to anti-Hegelian, entropic, and "Kulturepessimistische" theories of complete collapse of civilization. Gravity's Rainbow presents both of these totalizing alternatives self-reflectively and overtly.

On the one hand, there is paranoia, the "discovery that everything is
connected, everything in the Creation" (703); on the other, there is "antiparanoia,
where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long."
(434) It is fruitful to keep in mind what Michael Berube says about Pynchonesque
paranoia: it is not only rage for order and immobility, but also a sensitive form of
imaginative activitity[30]. N. Katherine Hayles has indicated that "antiparanoia" or "entropy"
contains potentials for both exhaustion and multiplication.[31]

*******

What comes out of the struggle between these centripetal and centrifugal forces that
always already, even internally, show themselves to be conflictual? The centrifugal low
elements may well be as such, as the working title Pynchon and for the novel goes,
"mindless pleasures"; uncontrollable plebeian here-and-now desires. Anyway, these
forces are seldom alone or pure in the novel: they are set against centripetal elements.
What is more, They-systems seem to be oozing through into every We-system: as
Derrida has written, it is impossible to get totally outside of the logocentric metaphysical
tradition[32]. What can you possibly make of it?

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White insist that the division between carnival and
normal life was internalized from the "early modern" period on. From the "licenced
event" that was distinguished from normal life carnivalesque changed into the low
suppressed area within four symbolic domains: psychic forms, the human body,
geographic space, and social order.[33] Pynchon's Zone can be seen as a 20th century
version of the carnivalesque market place, where the suppressed low elements of
bourgeois, modern, "realistic" subjectivity keep surfacing in constant motion, blurring
boundaries between these four symbolic domains when doing so. There is no hope getting
back distinct, autonomous categories, which, most probably, never existed in the first
place. (Still, borderlines are not canceled once-for-all; how could they, tense traffic
between insides and outsides growing continuosly?) The late Allon White writes
directly about Pynchon elsewhere:

The "high" languages of modern America -- technology, psychoanalysis,
business, administration and military jargon -- are "carnivalized" by a set of
rampant, irreverent, inebriate discourses from low life [...] In Gravity's
Rainbow history is referred to as a 'St. Giles fair' [sic][34], and the symbolic
pig, the carnival animal par excellence, wallows everywhere in Pynchon's
writing as the foul-mouthed but irrepressible subvert of prissy WASP orderliness.
[Pynchon] produces a dialogic confrontation whereby power and authority are
probed and ritually contested by these debunking vernaculars.[35]

The low symbolic pig wallows everywhere in Pynchon's writing all right, but it often
gets hybridized with high elements within the subjects of the novels. Among
Gravity's Rainbow's approximately 400 characters you may run into one "Andre
Omnopon, of the feathery Rilke mustaches and Porky Pig tattoo on stomach" (711), who
is, moreover, going to play a hybrid, apocryphal classic with his Counterforce chamber
orchestra: the Haydn Kazoo Quartet in G-Flat Minor -- 'kazoo' being this fart-sounding
mouth harp that provides cheap thrills.

********

Stallybrass and White stress that one ought to be careful not to regard carnival as a
transhistorical form of activity. White himself seems to forget this when claiming that
Pynchon's texts differ from the positive carnivalism of Joyce's Ulysses.
"[Pynchon's] heteroglossia becomes immobilized into a cold war without positive issue,
absurd and terrifying at once."[36] My intention is by no means to underestimate the
carnivalistic elements -- like the numerous parodies of Catholic discourses -- in Ulysses.
Still, in my view the novel encourages the reader to build up a transhistorical order from
the allusions to high culture contained in it. High canon is capable of achieving
dominance, of solving the puzzle. It is not that Pynchon's characters wouldn't search for
an order like that. The traditional carnivalistic novel gained much of its strength from
the way it ridiculed stable centers and high canonic traditions. When easily
distinguishable centers are missing, one is left with labyrinths instead of parodies.

Stallybrass and White emphasize the ways, in which the low elements are
suppressed and pushed underground in the making of bourgeois identity. The
inhabitants of Pynchon's Zone have it the other way round: these vigorously popular
cultural creatures are trying to find the missing high, centripetal forces (also those within
the characters themselves) beneath the visible. This makes them readers of a kind, and,
what is more, rather peculiar readers as it were: one character "reads", interprets, other
characters according to how they shiver, another reads them according to how they roll
cannabis reefers (641). There is a strong centripetal urge to find the lost, epic oneness:
"Somewhere, among the wastes of the World, is the key that will bring us back, restore
us to our Earth and to our freedom." (525) These, Enzian's, words appeal, but it seems
that even for the African Herero tribe the mythical return to pure epic time is no longer
possible. They are, like all the others, doomed to wallow in the mess of contemporary
global culture. They stay impure, each of them, but not all the same: it is impossible for
them to keep just the same as before, or same as the others; they keep making aching
differences. Anyway, they keep on, at least some of them.

The urge to find the all-explaining center betrays also a dialogic sensitivity toward
people and things, as I already indicated. The multitudinous "lyrical" passages in
Gravity's Rainbow, where the narrator and/or characters feel low after striving
for high unities, can never be "jollily relativized"[37] , as in the carnivalistic novelistic
tradition. The Zone becomes an ambiguous chronotope: open and secret, jolly and sore,
spontaneous and paranoid -- a labyrinthine marketplace, where is is hard to be in the
right place at the right time. It is as if the narrator would like to gather "all of you"
together, but the novel lacks that kind of community, a joint chronotope, which would
bring "all of us" together. (One problem, not the least, is that even the frequently
nostalgic narrator is not one, but many -- fragmentary or heterogeneous, hard to say.
And is anyone of "us" any one?) All in all, these interrogative, passionate, quasi-
transcendental passages make dialogic thrusts.

On the other hand, the popular cultural elements are not automatically
emancipatory, even though there seems to be open, democratic energy contained in
them. You really may feel high, when you experience the low. The novel becomes an
unsettling and tension-filled, dialogic but post-dialectic arena of centralizing and
marginalized discourses. The low elements act as supplements to the "sophisticated",
high canonic tradition, where Gravity's Rainbow bastardly and subversively
belongs. However, the labyrinthine features in the novel estrange the carnivalistic
tradition in their turn. The acts of reading (by both characters and their "acting" readers)
from oscillating thrusts to open up a field of possibilities of act/ion and pass/ion together.
The reading acts, as passible activity and activable pastime, may subvert here the
essentializing dichotomy between activity and passivity.

*********

Likewise the Zone itself subverts the opposition between war and peace. The open,
systematic acts of martial violence may have ended, but there is no peace yet that would
make it possible to escape into a petty-bourgeois stability. Consequently the nature of
dialogism in the Zone is not that of a harmonious, consensual intersubjectivity; rather
"dialogic" refers here to an inequal and ceaseless field of struggle, where tensions cannot
be swept under the carpet.[38] In many ways Gravity's Rainbow is a "war baby";
according to Steven Weisenburger the novel's chronology unfolds according to a
carefully drawn circular design that takes nine months[39], like pregnancy. There was
this song: "Never mind what your calendar say, ev'rybody's nine months old today!"
(538) Perhaps something is being born into the Zone -- a holy child? a monster baby? -- but we will never know the outcome, the tensions remain unsolved and in the air, open and
secret at the same time.

The energy required to keep this vast magnetic field going is provided by the rich
humus of popular culture. In order to maintain the dialogic state between war and peace
-- to prevent readers from taking refuge in harmonic, peaceful interiorities -- Pynchon's
novel recruits all the myriad (high and low, literary and extraliterary) genres and
discourses it possibly can cram into itself. This is, I gather, also to show that there are no
pure, autonomous extradiscursive positions outside the noisy intertextual arenas of the
novel. And We, whoever we are, have to operate in the same impure fields as Them: it
seems impossible for any of "Our Folks" to find some -- private or public -- space and
time that would not be at least slightly contaminated by Their readerly stories, Their
glorious marches and sad lullabies, Their Western grand narratives.

Yet simultaneously Their plottings seem to lose their transcendence, drawn as they
are form Their monological unities and heights into the bewildering field of the narration,
into this labyrinthine carnival -- and don't we have here the novel telling about itself?:

Well, there is the heart of it: the monumental yellow structure, out there in the
slum-suburban night, the never-sleeping percolation of life and enterprise through
its shell, Outside and Inside interpiercing one another too fast, too finely
labyrinthine, for either category to have much hegemony anymore. The nonstop
revue crosses its stage, crowding and thinning, surprising and jerking tears in an
endless ratchet: (681)

Within this mercurial interface, this kaleidoscopic narrative Zone (which is also a
Bakhtinian zone, the sphere of dialogic influence[40]) both Their centric
transcendence[41], and a transcendence that would sanctify any of Our
suppressed marginalities, prove impossible. Between these conflictual impossibilities
there unfolds a tense and dialogic matrix of possibilities. (T)here They and Their centers
multiply, which necessarily doesn't make Them less dangerous. We and Our
marginalities won't cohere into one emancipatory subject, which necessarily doesn't
make any of Our different clusters less capable of anything, at least less so than the previous antagonistic forces in history, whoever we might be.[42] It is a violent matrix, for sure -- there are no cutely negotiable, Rortyan ways out of it. But perhaps it is only in a Zone-like matrix, in a staggery boundary-crossing network, with modern illusions of closed autonomies melting into air, that those who (who?) have been kept out of time and out of space could possibly start getting themselves heard. Perhaps.

Gravity's Rainbow remains in a state of warlike peace, where power and
resistance don't make dialectically reducible opposites. As the novel wants to sing a
"counterforce traveling song" to you all, and perhaps to itself, too:

They've been sleeping on your shoulder
They've been crying in your beer,
And They've sung you all Their sad lullabies,
And you thought They wanted sympathy and didn't care
for souls,
And They never were about to put you wise
But I'm telling you today,
That it ain't the only way,
And there's shit you won't be eating anymore --
They've been paying you to love it,
But the time has come to shove it,
And it isn't a resistance, it's a war. (639-640)

Life during wartime is, however, hard work. To intervene in the dynamics of the
Zone means that you have to throw yourself (or your selves) there without guarantees
and safe positions. The traveling song has to keep traveling -- and "you" have to
become deterritorialized, and reterritorialized, time after time, all along. When the
division between inner and outer spheres is collapsing, you may feel like Nora Dodson-
Truck, a psychic medium in mental disorder, in the preceding episode: "[S]he will go
staggering into her own drawing-room to find no refuge even there, no, someone will
have caused to materialize for her a lesbian elephant soixante-neuf, slimy trunks
pistoning symmetrically in and out of juicy elephant vulvas, and when she turns to
escape this horrid exhibition she'll find some playful ghost has latched the door behind
her, and another's just about to sock her in the face with a cold Yorkshire pudding ..."
(638) Sometimes it feels insurmountable to survive the true, tense, and hybrid serio-comicality of the Zone...

NOTES

1. Bakhtin 1981, 84.

2. Throughout, ellipses are Pynchon's, except when enclosed in brackets.

3. ibid., 250.

4. E,g, Strehle, 192. Strehle's aim is to trace the influence of modern physics on some
contemporary writers.

5. Cf. for instance Hendin and Sanders.

6. On the novel as a jeremiad, see Smith & Tololyan.

7. See Bakhtin's "Epic and novel", Baktin 1981, 3-40.

8. According to Weisenburger, 1.

9. Holquist 1990, 113.

10. McHale, 95-114.

11. Translated by Weisenburger, 187.

12. In addition to the general condition of Bakhtinian dialogism (see Holquist 1990, 14-66),
this, of course, bears similarities with Derrida's critique of closed and transcendental
contexts in "Signature event context" and "Limited Inc.", both in Derrida 1988.

13. Weisenburger (187) has not found these lines in Borges's Obras Poeticas.

14. Kermode, 3.

15. Schaub, 43.

16. Dyer, 20-24.

17. ibid., 24.

18. Bakhtin 1981, 8.

19. The best essay on relations between Borges and Pynchon is probably Castillo.

20. Borges, 236.

21. Bakhtin 1981, 85.

22. See Molly Hite for the significance of "the trope of absent center" in Pynchon, esp.
Esp. 21-32.

23. This list owes much to the one that Weisenburger has offered (6).

24. Bakhtin 1973, 102-103.

25. E.g. Stallybrass & White, 13-15.

26. The concept is, of course, Lyotard's. He seems to think that Their grand narratives
have lost all validity and legitimacy, and we are left with Our local and democratic
"small" narratives. Pynchon takes the grand "project of modernity" much more
seriously, I think.

27. Jameson, 51-54. Accidentally, after writing this essay, I came across Steven Best's
article, where he states precicely that Gravity's Rainbow can be read as a
useful instrument, halfway stop, en route to total understanding of the Hegelian, all-
homogenizing stage of global late capitalism. Still, accroding to Best, Pynchon finally
[shortfallingly, preteritely, one could say] lacks the true information to find his place
in the cognizant vanguard.

28. Jameson, 34-36.

29. Bakhtin 1986, 147.

30. Berube, 220-221.

31. Hayles, 111-112.

32. Derrida 1972, 21. Linda Hutcheon finds it equally impossible to break away from
traditional narratives. What presents literary postmodernism to her, works of
historiographic metafiction, first inscribe themselves in traditions, and only this done
feel able to subvert these traditions. (224.) In my view this is close to Pynchon's
strategies.

33. Stallybrass & White, 2-3.

34. Actually this happens in V., Pynchon 1975, 307. In Gravity's Rainbow the
War is "Night's Mad Carnival" (133).

35. White, 135.

36. ibid., 136.

37. Bakhtin 1973, 102.

38. In Dialogics of the Oppressed Peter Hitchcock also emphasizes the latter definition
of dialogism at the expence of the former.

39.Weisenburger, 9-11.

40. Holquist 1981, 434.

41. And thus total manipulation of Us proves impossible, too. The Foucauldian view (at least
in Discipline and Punish) of Their all-powerful control and Lyotardian view of Our
nice new freedom seem to make together a neat logocentric binary opposition. Pynchon's
novel takes these totalizing opposites into the same immanent field and ultimately shows
that they cannot be thought about and talked about one without the other.

42. This notion is very close to the view of Jim Collins in his bathbreaking study on
postmodernism and popular culture.